The ever growing worldwide expansion of enterprises together with the requirement of rationalization of production processes leads increasingly to a reorganization of the business processes involved.
In "Workflow Management: Integration von Organisation und Informationsverarbeitung" by H. Heilmann, HMD, 176, 1994, pages 8-21, a business process which leads up to the creation or utilization of enterprise performance is termed a delimitable, often job-sharing process. In this context, the center of consideration is the dynamic progress of the process from initiation to conclusion. Frequently, the term "workflow" is used instead of the term "business process".
In "Business Process Management with FlowMark" by F. Leymann and D. Roller, Digest of Papers, Cat. No. 94CH3414-0, Spring COMPCON 94, 1994, pages 230 to 234, the Workflow Management System, IBM FlowMark is described. The possibilities of modeling business processes are presented, and the execution of the WorkFlow Management is described.
The desire of the enterprise to optimize its business processes is the catalyst for the reorganization of its business processes. Due to the complexity and the close interconnection of business processes within an enterprise, optimization of business processes offers a giant savings potential with regard to energy, time and expense. Furthermore, the quality of products can be improved due to the optimization of the processes, and the competitiveness of the enterprise will be improved due to higher flexibility and shorter response times.
Previously known methods for optimization of business processes are based upon a simulation concept. These known methods attempt to determine, on the basis of assumptions, the effect of altering the use of resources upon the business targets of the business process. Calculations are carried out using various resource parameters in order to optimize the business process regarding such business targets.
In this context, resources are to be understood to be all participants in the course of the business process, including machines, humans, computer programs, etc. As a rule, business targets are prefixed by the enterprise and include, for example, turnover, quality, cost or runtime.
In T. Jaeger et al.: "A Framework for Automatic Improvement of Workflows to Meet Performance Goals", Proceedings Sixth International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, New Orleans, La., USA, Nov. 6-9, 1994 IEEE Comput. Soc. Press. Los Alamitos, Calif., USA, ISBN 0 8186 6785 0, a method for the optimization of business processes is presented. The presented method uses query techniques from the technical area of Artificial Intelligence (Al) in order to control modifications of the system model. Also in that method, estimations are made, such as how a modification of the resources will act upon the medium process time of an activity in a business process. Optimizations of the business process are based upon such estimations.
Known business process optimization procedures require the finding of parameters that affect the business process and modeling (as well as quantifying) the extent of the influence of such parameters; in particular, it is required to make assumptions concerning the influence of modifications or redistribution of the available resources. Such qualification and quantification of the influencing parameters require a great deal of administrative effort. A further disadvantage of the prior methods is that the influence of such parameters is dynamic, meaning that they, as a rule, will change over the course of time. This necessitates checking the validity of the assumed quantification.
There is the further disadvantage in that not all of the influencing parameters may be qualified or even quantified. So, there are parameters which escape a modelation and quantification due to their nature and appearance; e.g., items such as customer satisfaction with their causal interconnections cannot be determined with mathematical precision. By the same token, the saving of time due to the use of a supporting computer program may vary depending on such items as corporate culture or employment of collaborators which, in turn, are too complex to be described exactly.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for conducting business process management with a computer system, in which the influencing parameters do not require explicit determination, modeling and quantification.
It is a further object of the invention to take into consideration the dynamic behavior of the flow of business processes during the optimization of a business process while keeping the technical effort as low as possible.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a method and a device for the management of a business process with a computer system that takes into account all influencing parameters acting in reality during the optimization of the business process.